Oldest Fossil Seahorses

Oldest fossil seahorses found, according to National Geographic 4 May 2009 and Reefbuilders 5 May 2009. Jure Žalohar of Slovenia's University of Ljubljana has found a number of beautifully preserved seahorse fossils in siltstone in Slovenia. He and his colleagues were looking for fossil insects in the area, so finding seahorse fossils was a complete surprise. The fossils include juveniles and adults of several species, and are dated at 13 million years old, making them the oldest seahorse fossils found so far. One of the fossils is an extinct seahorse, described by National Geographic as being “among the first evidence of the only known extinct seahorse species ever found, Hippocampus slovenicus. The fish is similar to living pygmy seahorses, but has a considerably longer snout.” The fossils are so well preserved they show signs of black flecks in their skin. National Geographic goes on to say: “They probably dwelled in dense beds of seagrass, where food - such as small crustaceans - was abundant. The seahorses' black flecks would have camouflaged them in the vegetation, which the fish also likely anchored themselves to using their prehensile tails.” According to reefbuilders.com, “The finds shed some light on the evolution of seahorses and their gregarious nature which is still evident in modern seahorses.”

Editorial Comment: Give the find a new species name and then claim it as evidence for evolution of species and hope that nobody notices that the new fossil find was instantly recognizable as a seahorse, so close in structure to the living Hippocampus sea horses it had to be put into that group. Have you noticed that Genesis is not about the origin of species, but the origin of Kinds? There is no evidence in these new fossils here that some non-seahorse kind evolved into a seahorse kind, but there is abundant evidence that seahorses have produced after their kind from the first known ones to the present. Furthermore, the seahorses may have lived in beds of seagrass but the fossil insects found in the same rocks did not. Finding well preserved land and sea creatures together is evidence that this fossil bed is not a buried ecosystem, but the results of a catastrophic event that swept up many creatures, mixed them and rapidly dumped and buried them. (Ref. ichthyology, arthropods, sediments)